The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721).Volume IX. From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift.

XIV. Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns.

§ 1. The long Blight on Scottish Secular Verse; Exceptional popularity of Lyndsay.

DURING a large portion of the sixteenth, and nearly the whole of the seventeenth, century a blight had fallen on secular verse in Scotland; so great a blight that very little of the best and most characteristic verse of the makaris would have come down to us but for its preservation in MSS. One or two pieces by Henryson and Dunbar were printed at Edinburgh by Chepman and Myllar in 1508; Henrysons irreproachable Morall Fables were printed by Lekprevick at St. Andrews in 1570; but it was in London, and after his death, that even the Vergil of Gavin Douglas appeared in 1553 and his Palice of Honour in 1579. Lyndsays poems, printed in London and elsewhere before the reformation, were probably circulated privately in Scotland, where, after the reformation, many editions were published; and they retained their exceptional popularity during the seventeenth century. But, Lyndsay excepted, the old makaris were never much known outside the circle of the court or the learned classes; and, though James VI himself wrote verse and patronised Montgomerie and other poets, the old poetic succession virtually perished with the advent of Knox.